Only Lovers Left Alive, Cinemas across London

Jim Jarmusch’s bang-on-trend take on the vampire love story was greeted with much fanfare in Cannes last year. It is refreshing to see a vampire film that hasn’t sucked all the genre clichés dry. Jarmusch, the rock-star director with hair so icily white that it actually exudes cool, claims to have never seen the Twilight movies. 

The film itself makes fun of vampire lore. One particularly deadpan line, delivered by a spaced-out Mia Wasikowska goes: “I bet you’re still scared of garlic.” The majority of the film is set at night and, in many ways, the nightscape is very much in Jarmusch’s comfort zone. He made his name with independent black-and-white films that meander through deadbeat parts of town and country, following their misfit characters. This film’s studies of Detroit ad Tangiers at night are works of art in themselves. 

The real reason to see this Only Lovers Left Alive, though, is to see the performances of long-standing British favourites Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston, who play two eternal lovers, Adam and Eve. The actors are natural choices for the roles of two immortal, beautiful, cultural-aesthete vampires. They know everything about vintage guitars and used to hang out with Byron, way back when. Tilda Swinton’s inherently regal poise and feline movements lend themselves effortlessly to the role. Tom Hiddleston plays a reclusive Detroit rock star who has acquired a cult following and makes a perfect, equally pale and seductively languorous, emphatically check-boned fellow partner. Together they might have just made the sexiest vampire movie known to man. Move over Ed and Bella.